Performance of Betsy begins 40th Anniversary Celebration in New York

Betsy originated in 2002 during a creative collaboration between Appalshop's Ron Short and Nashville jazz pianist Beegie Adair. Betsy is the story of a Bronx born Puerto Rican jazz singer who stirs up the little-known history of her Scotch-Irish ancestry, bringing to life ghosts that have a life of their own: an orphaned teenager tricked into leaving Ireland to become an indentured servant in 18th century North America, her seducer, and their descendants; a grown woman finding her bearings in the rhythms of a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the 21st century, a time traveling woman whose soul rests in her Caribbean and Scotch-Irish origins. This musical is alive with the fire of jazz, bluegrass, and Latin compositions delivered by three powerful vocalists and a five-member Latin-Appalachian band. Three years in the making, Betsy's music was composed by Roadside's Ron Short, Nashville jazz pianist Beegie Adair, and Pregones's Desmar Guevara.

Music is the key to Betsy's matrilineal narrative. Drawing upon jazz and bluegrass, the play's songs suggest intricate and unforeseen entanglements in the title character's search for her past. It is in the encounter of these two vast American musical traditions that Betsy first recognizes rhythmic, cultural, and historical affinities between America's North and South, between its rural and urban heartlands, between its African and European roots.

Spanning the time from the nation's founding to the present, and with talented Afro-Puerto Rican composer Desmar Guevara on board to elaborate the Caribbean dimension, the story of Betsy comes full circle: The play begins with an orphaned teenager tricked into leaving Ireland to become an indentured servant in 18th century America, and ends with a grown woman finding her bearings in the Caribbean enclave of the South Bronx.

Pregones and Roadside each bring to the project a distinct theatrical aesthetic based on the expressions of Puerto Rican and Appalachian culture respectively. The context for this exchange, itself an original contribution to the American theater, has been gradually established over the course of fifteen years, and its credits include the creation and national tour of Promise of a Love Song. Betsy builds on that prior artistic and critical success, and on the knowledge of how to undertake an intercultural, multi-state touring enterprise.

Proceeds from this gala presentation of Betsy benefit Appalshop, which marks the beginning of its 40th year as a multi-disciplinary arts and education center in the heart of Appalachia producing original films, video, theater, music and spoken-word recordings, radio, photography, multimedia, and books.